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1)In D.C. today, Sen. Jim Inhofe and others of like mind bring up extraordinarily misleading information about global warming, such as repeating Pat Michaels’ shibboleth-cum-hoax that if we did everything promised under the Kyoto Protocol (which, remember, only covered the years from 1990 to 2012**, and wasn’t even reached, much less ratified, until 1997) it would only result in lowering atmospheric temperatures by 7/100ths of a degree Centigrade. (Reason it’s a hoax: Everyone knows that we have to keep cutting greenhouse gas emissions far past 2010 if we are to avert a climate calamity.)*

2)In a recent meeting in Copenhagen, an international body of scientific experts on polar bears concludedthat melting sea ice means that eight of the world’s 19 populations of the furry white beasts are now in decline. That’s up from five that were in decline the last time the world’s polar bear experts met in 2005. (Andy Revkin of the New York Times points out in a worthwhile postthat there are serious data gaps; so we don’t really know how many of these populations are faring. We do know, however, that the sea ice they depend on appears to be disappearing.)

**Our favorite storyon today’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing so far comes to us from Reuters India (!) news service’s coverage. Hed: A Dollar a Day Could Keep Climate Change Away.

Update 2:37 p.m.: Tip o the hat to David Robertson at Grist for tweeting to alert us to this interesting piece on TheHill.com, which argues Republicans are hurting themselves by digging in their heels on the climate issue. Of course, keep in mind that it’s written by bigtime Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

** Correction: Post originally misstated the end date for the Kyoto Protocol.

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Wow. We never asked for this, never expected it. But we’re so happy to be bringing you news of our exciting new way of committing journalism and boosting civic engagement in our society.

It was exactly six months ago today, at 5:01 p.m. on Jan. 8, when I picked up the phone at my desk at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to hear a familiar source from the Environmental Protection Agency ask, “Robert, what is happening with your paper?” I trotted to the TV monitors to learn our paper’s future was very much in doubt.

At noon the next day a corporate muckety-muck from New York marched into the newsroom to unabashedly inform us the paper was “for sale,” and that if no buyer was found we would soon stop printing the newspaper. That was Friday. By 10 a.m. the next Monday, a few of us were figuring out how we could keep doing this work – the journalism that sustains our democracy.

A blurry and head-spinning half a year later, we’re launching InvestigateWest, a journalism studio focused on the environment, public health and social justice issues in western North America. We are out to break stories that inform the public, get citizens involved in helping us report those stories, and educate a new generation of journalists. We want to remake the mold of journalism, as has been necessary a few times before in our republic’s history – and which proved crucial to our success as a democracy.

Setting up a non-profit corporation was never something I thought I’d have to do. It’s been a huge education.

While the core of our start-up team worked at the Seattle P-I, we have been working hard to learn how to present our stories across news-delivery platforms. We’re starting to work with radio and television journalists.